Tag Archives: novel

Book Review: Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult

I read this book because I read Small Great Things & I appreciated Jodi Picoult wanting to write about racial issues in the U.S. Leaving Time is another novel where the author explores big societal issues. It tackles the issues of grief, man’s inhumanity towards man, and man’s mistreatment of wild, undomesticated animals.

What you should know.

As usual the author’s research is noteworthy. There is talent in educating yourself accurately and thoroughly and then being able to incorporate that knowledge into a story so that it is entertaining instead of lecturing. If that is important to you in your choice of reading you won’t be disappointed here. The book takes place in North America and South Africa. It has characters who narrate first person point of view in the present and also one character who narrates in the past.

What I liked.

This book has much to offer. There is a child protagonist. There is a psychic! There is good old fashioned detective work. There is a missing person. And there are unsolved mysteries with suspects at every turn.

Picoult’s focus on wild and captured elephants is very nicely handled. It’s great reading. Real, grounded storytelling at its best. I saw everything vividly, pictured the animals, their emotions, and the challenging work done by caregivers and researchers alike.

By moving seamlessly between four character POVs the pace remains fresh, only bogging down slightly on occasion when Alice, researching elephant grieving, shares insights about her experiences.

The author makes several strong statements about human behavior that should be studied. You might disagree with some of them. However, without scientific evidence to support one position or the other, who’s to say whether those hinted at by Picoult’s prose or your’s are correct? It will certainly offer up topics for discussion regardless. If only elephants conducted anthropological studies we might learn something useful!

What I didn’t like.
The two main characters are intellectual in the fact they are highly educated. The main protagonist is unabashedly selfish. It could be that this is typical human behavior, and I am perhaps ignorant. But it also could be that I am unwilling to accept such a trait in this story. It does however speak to a larger trend in the novel.

One of the distinct aspects of the story is that the actions of all the humans are described without any moral assessment of them whatsoever. Other than making an effort to help elephants, none of the humans do any good, in my opinion. Everything they do besides help elephants is either harmful to themselves or other people.

So it begs the question. What should the characters learn from the experience? What should the reader conclude from this? The only single explanation given by the author is that humans are less evolved than elephants. Are we to infer then that humans are evolutionarily bereft of the ability to identify and then perform moral acts (except one, trying to right the wrong done to elephants by other humans)?

If the message was that we are best served learning from the behavior of elephants, it was overshadowed by the fact the humans behaved so badly it left no room for debate.

Like this:

This is a novel about real world spying, relatively modern post-cold war espionage between nation states. It is written by a retired intelligence professional. I’m not sure anyone not interested in the genre would want to read it. Just as I would guess anyone who is interested in the genre would most likely read it. It is both violent and pro American, not as if those two characteristics go hand in hand.

What I liked

The story takes its time developing. It isn’t in a hurry. Which allows for readers to get to know the people as well as the places they inhabit. The story is multilayered with several characters having to experience life and make choices about who they are, what they want to accomplish, and who they ultimately may become.

The author goes after President Putin. Apparently, nobody wants to go after him in real life, at least it happens in this novel.

There is real suspense. There are harrowing encounters. The romantic aspect isn’t overdone. Enough interest is built that you definitely want to know how it all turns out.

What I didn’t like

Jason Matthews gives one of the main characters, Dominika Egorova, a gift of sorts, the ability to sense letters as colors. The diagnosis is that she is a synesthete, someone who perceives sounds, or letters, or numbers as colors. Eventually she develops the ability to read emotions and even detect deception and ill will by interpreting the colors she sees around other people. Fascinating. Yet how would someone best take advantage of this? To become a ballerina, apparently. So our challenge then is whether to accept how someone with this ability would use it. Would that Matthews had made a stronger case for why Dominika only uses it to survive internal office politics in Russia.

This is book one of a trilogy. Book two is Palace of Treason and book three is The Kremlin’s Candidate. While we certainly like trilogies when we can’t get enough of a story, this one left me wondering whether I’d ever read books 2 and 3. That isn’t a good sign.

Book Review: The Prophecy Con (Rogues of the Republic book 2), By Patrick Weekes

Chaos Abounds

What you should know

Read The Palace Job(Rogues of the Republic book 1) first. It introduces all of the important players and is a better book all around.

The Prophecy Con picks up in the epilogue of The Palace Job an continues to tell stories about many of the characters introduced in book 1 and re-introduced to an extent in book 2. To appreciate the full backstory and understand who the characters are completely, you have to read book 1. But that’s a good thing.

In a realm where one part of the world is governed by an empire, and the other a republic, a war is building that could determine the future of both societies, and everyone in them.

What I liked

Author Patrick Weekes proved his ability to write enjoyable dialogue in book 1. The more of that I found in The Prophecy Con the more I liked it. The Palace Job introduced us to some very interesting, humorous, multidimensional characters, who are easy to appreciate. Weekes writes about them and takes great care in keeping them consistent to their values, as he reveals more about them, and as they deal with growing challenges in their relationships, and their struggles to survive against difficult odds.

What I didn’t like

There just wasn’t enough down time for me. The author seemed obsessed with frenetic action to the point where he gave no breaks between one violent conflict after another. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Even within each fight, he kept raising the stakes, doubling and tripling down within the combat to add doubt about the outcome and heighten the intensity. The problem with doing that, I found, was that not only did it seem like the characters needed more than two arms, two legs, and one head to cope with all the simultaneous assaults, I needed to be two readers to keep up with what was happening. That, I’m afraid, didn’t happen.

I want to be fair here, but book 1 didn’t fall into that trap. I’m reading, believing that the heroes will survive each onslaught, they got through the first book didn’t they? Yet with every line Weekes seems to try to get me to believe they have to do the impossible in order to be alive in the next chapter. If I was one of the characters, I’d offer to sacrifice myself, just to avoid all the suffering I’ll have to endure in the remaining chapters. Can a brother get a breather?

Another problem with the plot is that one, or more, its hard to tell at times, of the characters has the apparent ability to disguise themselves while knowing what everyone else is doing. Sort of like the fly on the wall, or having the ability to be completely undetectable. Some not only disappear, but they disappear into other beings. It’s a problem because these characters leave the reader guessing too much. Who are they? How many are they? They were so hidden I had trouble distinguishing them from each other. What is they’re agenda? Whose side are they on anyway? These secret characters wield so much control it seems like they’re outside the story. You never get to know what rules govern these mysterious beings, certainly not the same rules that apply to the more or less human characters. So they provide mostly frustration when I think they’re supposed to be adding suspense.

Not as much fun reading.
Questions raised in The Palace Job included what separated these two major powers, and how would the future be impacted by their differences? The Prophecy Con addresses these to some degree. However, the real question the book emphasized was who were the real puppet-masters? The significant leaders in the republic and the empire did not have enough intelligence or integrity to prevent them from being manipulated by anyone with more than an adolescent level of maturity.

John Grisham is in my short list of favorite authors alongside Tana French, Philip Kerr and Pierce Brown. My two favorites are probably Runaway Jury and The Client. I never finished Gray Mountain so that would not be a positive review if it came down to it.

Camino Islandis a heist story. It takes place in the book world. My complements to John Grisham for writing a novel about the novel writing business. A book about authors and their work can’t be all bad. I’m convinced this book is Grisham’s tribute to his readers and book lovers in general. It’s also a salute to independent bookstore owners

What I liked:

The story takes place in the summer. I chose it as a summer read. It’s so appropriate to have summer novels cover the summer season! It’s on the beach too. What a perfect setting for a summer read. The only regret I have is that I didn’t take it to the beach with me.

There’s a nice vignette depicting authors talking about authors and writing. Or not talking about writing. Apparently, writers come in two camps, those that talk about their writing and those that don’t. Either way this for me was the cornerstone of Camino Island. I wish there was more, a lot more, of the group of writers. That was a book I really could have gotten into. There wasn’t enough of that part of the book for me.

There’s a private insurance investigation group of characters in the story. This part also has potential. I could see an entire series of novels based on them. I doubt that John Grisham has the inspiration to do that though. He’s written so much already and I don’t think he needs the money. Oh Well.

What I didn’t like

None of the thieves involved in the heist were convincing. Having spent time around people who steal things, I have an impression of what they’re like. None of them were given much depth either. At least if they weren’t convincing I might have tolerated them had I gotten to know them a little bit.

I got the impression that Grisham was interested in writing about one character – Bruce Cable – a book store owner. He spends his time and energy on Cable. Just not enough on the others, any of them, to make the book enjoyable.

He has another character, a young author named Mercer, who is struggling to write her second novel. She is also struggling, financially and personally. However, her story would have meant a totally different book. I suspect Grisham didn’t find her challenges interesting enough on their own, so he folded her into this heist novel. Mercer has writer’s block. I am wondering if she’s a projection of the writer’s block Grisham had trying to write the novel about her, until he gave up and put her in Camino Island. All in all I expect Grisham fans will appreciate this book. If you aren’t a fan I can’t see any reason why this one would convince you otherwise.